1.17.2009

November 2008 - PR

School was very time-consuming and draining at this point, so I wasn’t in a place to work any more on the other 3 stories, and at the same time the clock was ticking on getting the money for the film.

My original goal for having finances was November because the back-order on the Red camera was six months (no longer backordered). As being behind schedule is no good, the money problem became priority number one (if there’s no money, there’s no movie, and if there’s no movie then what’s the point of the story?).

I started dotting my i’s and crossting my t’s. The website needed a lot of work. If someone wants to give money, how are they going to do it? If it’s not easy, it won’t happen. So I added Pay Pal links through the website to accept donations, loans, and investments. I made up flyers that my friend, Blake, put up in a few local Starbucks, flyered 600 cars, and wrote several drafts of a general letter for anyone to read and be interested in the project.

My mom suggested making a video to tell people about the project in a few minutes without having to read. After a few days of thinking, she was right. So, I buckled down and made a four-minute explanatory, promotional video explaining the project. Ideally, it could have been a higher quality video, but the end of the semester time crunch didn’t leave any more time than being able to animate some photoshop stuff together and adding computerized voices together. It’s not a video to be particularly proud of, but it does its job in explaining the project.

Several professors gave feedback on the video and the drafted letter. They gave me the “looks good,” so I took posted the video and took letters around to a couple hundred houses around the D.C. area. Before returning for Christmas break, my friend, Kelley, and I flyered a handful of cars, and I contacted every television and radio station in my hometown to see if they would be interested in running a story on the project.